The way enterprises conduct business continues to advance. The key for an enterprise to succeed in this environment often depends on how quickly the enterprise's information technology (IT) organization adapts to evolving business needs. Therefore, a major challenge to these enterprises is how they handle change. To enable business agility, enterprise applications must be not only high-performance business engines, but also be flexible building blocks of future business systems.
A recent promising solution has risen in the form of services. A service, such as a Web service or other program accessible through a network, may represent a self-contained, self-describing piece of application functionality that can be found and accessed by other applications. A service may be considered self-contained because the application using the service does not have to depend on anything other than the service itself, and self-describing because all the information on how to use the service can be obtained from the service itself. The descriptions may be centrally stored and accessible through standard mechanisms.
Instead of requiring programmers to establish and maintain links between applications, services can be loosely coupled, making connections simpler and more flexible and allowing application architects to more easily find and understand services offered by other cooperative applications. However, a problem that exists with services is that they are often designed to expose functionality of individual applications and thus are too limited to be efficient building blocks for enterprise-wide business processes.
An answer to this shortfall has been the migration to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA is an open architecture middleware, which builds on the benefits of services. An example of an SOA can be found in the Enterprise Service Framework (ESF), which is commercially available from SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany. The term “SOA” may also be used to refer to “distributed objects” architecture, such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model).
The SOA enables the abstraction of business objects (BO), modeled as services (also referred to as enterprise services), from actual applications. Aggregating services into business-level enterprise services may provide more meaningful building blocks for the task of automating enterprise-scale business scenarios. Enterprise services allow IT organizations to efficiently develop composite applications, which may be defined as applications that compose functionality and information from existing systems to support new business processes or scenarios.
The SOA also enables the use of an enterprise services repository. The enterprise services repository stores relevant pre-existing enterprise services and makes them available to selected partners and customers. By using the enterprise services repository, these selected partners and customers can use the pre-existing enterprise services to aid in the implementation of new services and corresponding business objects. An “object” refers to a software bundle of variables (e.g., data) and related methods. For example, in object-oriented programming, an object is a concrete realization (instance) of a class that consists of data and the operations associated with that data. The term business object (BO) thus represents a data structure, such as an object, having significance to a business (e.g. a business object for providing a purchase order).
When services and business objects are developed, the fields which may be filled in with values at a user interface may be defined within the business object and may be fixed for the lifetime of the application providing the business object. For example, a business object for a purchase order may have a field for the purchase order id and a field for the date. If these fields need to be updated or changed, however, each business object that contains the values must be updated as well. As such, there is a need to improve development of business objects and their corresponding values.